---
title: New Features
---

The JavaScript language is updated yearly with new features. If you haven't used JavaScript in a while, you'll likely see some unfamiliar syntax in React Native code.

> If you're brand new to JavaScript, I wrote a separate intro-to-JavaScript guide, which you may want to check out before diving into React Native: [JavaScript Express](https://www.javascript.express). It also covers TypeScript. It's still a work-in-progress, but it covers quite a bit already.

## Language highlights

In this section, we'll cover a handful of interesting features from recent years which are common in React Native apps:

- Imports and exports
- Block-scoped declarations
- Arrow functions
- Classes
- Destructuring
- Spread
- Async/await
